Taking the expression “time is money” to heart, Gattaca director Andrew Niccol imagines a future where people don’t age past 25, and wealth is measured by the remaining hours on everyone’s individual clock. In this world, a coffee shaves two minutes off your life and a past-due bill can literally kill.

So Justin Timberlake’s Will Salas works at a factory job, earning just enough hours to keep on living. After saving the life of a rich dude who has time to kill, Will unexpectedly inherits enough years on his clock to challenge a system that makes the wealthy immortal and the poor quick to expire. Unfortunately, this rather clever concept is squandered in a low-rent action movie that really ends up being a waste of time.

Check out the trailer here:

You can’t help but imagine what In Time would have been had Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) or Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men) made it. The movie certainly has the conceptual pedigree to be a sci-fi classic. Is it really that hard to believe that science would eventually stall aging, especially when plastic surgery has been shooting in that direction for ages?

Niccol easily creates a conceivable dystopia from this conceit, one that mirrors our current economic climate where the rich hoard all the resources while the poor are left fighting for scraps in an overtly gentrified society. Ironically, In Time hurries through the exposition to make way for the action, refusing us the time to get familiar both with this imaginary future and the characters we’re supposed to be rooting for.

As complex as the premise is, the characters are anything but. Timberlake’s Will has as much nuance and edge as Paul Walker in the Fast and the Furious movies.

Seems that Timberlake’s spot-on performance in The Social Network was just a fluke, as he proves incapable of playing anything but the smiley wise-ass who doesn’t take anything seriously, not even when there’s a gun pointed at his head. Nonetheless, Timberlake gets a few humorous moments with costar Amanda Seyfried, who plays a rich girl who becomes the Bonnie to Will’s Clyde. As talented as Seyfried is, even she is left with little do but look sexy holding a gun. She certainly does that well, with her china doll looks standing out among an exceptionally attractive cast that also includes Olivia Wilde as Will’s mom. In a world where no one ages, the entire cast gets to be eye-catching (guys, take note). However, the action is deathly dull, with standard, unimaginative chases and shootouts that will have you checking your watch as much as the people do in this movie.